Like this:

A year or two ago, a friend told me a real-life story that broke my heart.

The story began with one woman she knew saying, “Man, that lady is so lucky!” and the women around her replying, “Say what?! You’d only think that if you didn’t know what she had to endure to be where she is now!”

In this case, “that lady” lost just about everything–everyone–she loved in a single night.

With the terrible space that created, she eventually made room for other people who had suffered greatly.

Now, they fly together, all of them having lost so much … but all of them also having found each other.

It doesn’t make their story happy, but it certainly makes it less lonely and more full of love.

Maybe that, when it comes right down to it, is its own happy-enough ending.

Like this:

Several years ago, I wrote about the deadly consequences of devastatingly costly health care in “Dead Moms Can’t Care.” I always hoped my just-younger sister Rache, who carried our mom through her final days, would write a follow-up post here.

She didn’t exactly write that, but she did write a couple somethings like one. I wasn’t going to share this here, but, you know what? I am so proud of how my once-quiet sister has grown into a fierce, loving advocate.

She no longer speaks in the softest of voices, and I love to. hear. her. roar
(with somuchlove).

Unfortunately–or is it fortunately, for other reasons?–I happened to check out Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile two weeks ago. I only made it a few chapters in before I realized I’d need my own print copies to highlight, annotate, and reference.

The book was so much more illuminating than anything else I’ve read, I decided to buy the four-book Incerto series it concluded. I listened to two of the three other books, Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, while waiting for my Incerto box set to arrive.

Well, other audiobooks will save me money, I thought. So there’s that.

The last time I was this excited about a box set, it had “Buffy” in the title

—

[vignette]

Last Monday, I left work sick. I briefly explained my concerns to a friend.

Like this:

I have a Bernie 2020 sticker on my car. The sticker’s not really about Bernie, although I do admire him. The sticker’s about his message of “Not Me, Us.”

My key takeaway from a year of intensive political book-reading is this:

There is no leader who can save us.

This might sound ominous, but I don’t mean it that way at all. The gist of “not me, us” was–is–that we have to work together to save ourselves. We have to stand up and step up for each other. At the very least, we have to rise for our children; no matter what our neighbor does or which candidate he selected in the presidential election, all our children will bear the brunt of all the economic and ecological debts we’re shoveling upon them as we bicker instead of all working for dramatic, aggressive change as if humankind depends on it.

Like this:

My childhood home stood on a corner. In addition to having a small lawn at its front, it had one outside the backyard fence along its left side. My mom once planted several small trees there.

A few years after she planted them, she happened to talk to a man who worked with trees. He said that one of the trees should be cut down, pointing to some kind of dark mark inside a gash and saying the tree was already dead. It looked very much alive to my mom, who argued there must be something she could do to save it.

Nope, he affirmed. It’s already dead. It just looks like it’s still alive because it takes a while to for results of death to be evident to the human eye.